Saturday, September 19, 2015

Morally speaking, our new culture has divided us into
victims and perpetrators. Gone is the presupposition that we are people of good
will who might have offended. Gone is the moral injunction to turn the other
cheek.

You might not be a criminal. You might not have committed a
macroaggression, but unless you can find a way into the class of victims, you
are surely guilty of something.

Jonathan Haidt describes the cultural transformation. I
quote him at length (via Jonah Goldberg) to take slight issue with him:

I just read the most extraordinary paper
by two sociologists — Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning — explaining why
concerns about microaggressions have erupted on many American college campuses
in just the past few years. In brief: We’re beginning a second transition of
moral cultures. The first major transition happened in the 18th and 19th
centuries when most Western societies moved away from cultures of honor (where
people must earn honor and must therefore avenge insults on their own) to
cultures of dignity in which people are assumed to have dignity and don’t need
to earn it. They foreswear violence, turn to courts or administrative bodies to
respond to major transgressions, and for minor transgressions they either
ignore them or attempt to resolve them by social means. There’s no more
dueling.

Campbell and Manning describe how this culture of dignity is now giving way to
a new culture of victimhood in which people are encouraged to respond to even
the slightest unintentional offense, as in an honor culture. But they must not
obtain redress on their own; they must appeal for help to powerful others or
administrative bodies, to whom they must make the case that they have been
victimized. It is the very presence of such administrative bodies, within a
culture that is highly egalitarian and diverse (i.e., many college campuses)
that gives rise to intense efforts to identify oneself as a fragile and
aggrieved victim. This is why we have seen the recent explosion of concerns
about microaggressions, combined with demands for trigger warnings and safe
spaces, that Greg Lukianoff and I wrote about in The Coddling of the American
Mind.

By this reasoning, a culture of dignity is morphing into an
honor culture. But what, after all does that mean? Don't honor and dignity belong to the same class of moral virtues?

This point struck me, because serious
thinkers in the not-so-distant past have defined a clear distinction between shame
and guilt cultures. Not honor and dignity cultures, but shame and guilt cultures. Among them, Ruth Benedict in her wonderful book: The Chrysanthemum and the Sword.

I wrote about shame and guilt cultures in my book Saving Face. I offered many salient
points about the distinction in my book The
Last Psychoanalyst.

In part, it’s about multicultural diversity. Proponents of the honor culture meme believe that if someone says
he is acting to restore his honor he is acting to restore his honor.
If you believe that each culture can define its moral concepts as it pleases,
and thus that there are no universal rules, you might make the argument. I find
it untenable.

In some cultures, classed by these authors as honor
cultures, people murder their children
because they believe that that is the way to restore family honor. Do you
really believe that there is something honorable in such an action?

These forms of punishment are not characteristic of shame
cultures, or honor cultures or dignity cultures. They belong to guilt cultures. In a shame culture the price
for transgression is ostracism. In a guilt culture, the price for transgression
is death or mutilation. Excessive
sensitivity to dishonorable behavior, to the point where one makes it a
criminal activity, is the hallmark of a guilt culture.

I hate to go all universal on you, but murdering your
daughter because she held hands with a boy does not restore your honor. It is
disgraceful behavior and labels you as a moral degenerate. Any culture that
condones such practices is a moral monstrosity.

To take the case discussed in the text quoted above, the
current mania over microaggressions and trigger warnings is an effort to
criminalize slights that are often unintentional. It’s like saying that
inappropriate touching is equivalent to felonious rape.

If you do not see the difference, try this out. An attorney
is in court addressing a jury in a rape trial. He declares that the defendant
deserves to do 10 to 20 in Dannemora because… he touched her inappropriately. Does that describe what happened? Is anyone dumb enough to believe that? Unfortunately, some people are.

What do we gain when we turn slights and insults, inadvertent
or advertent, into crimes?

The new culture that is currently trying to take over
America is a guilt culture. It divides the world into criminals and victims. If
you do not belong to a privileged victim class, you are guilty, whether you
committed a crime or not.

Once you feel sufficiently guilty, they will tell you that
you can assuage your guilt by paying off the debt you incurred by committing the
crime, or by belonging to a class of people that oppressed and exploited
the victim class.

Now, you owe them something. That something might be
reparations; it might be government largesse and redistribution; it might be
affirmative action. In effect, this massive guilt trip is an effort to extort
money and perhaps even respect. (In a shame culture, these are earned by the way you conduct yourself.)

Does it bespeak a culture of honor? Assuming that you
understand the concept of honor, it does not.

There is no honor in making yourself completely dependent on
the moods and whims of other people. There is no honor in blaming your failures
on others. There is no honor in refusing to take responsibility for your errors or
your successes. And there is no honor in embracing a notion of victimhood that
makes you a ward of the state, that consigns you to perpetual childishness.

Come to think of it, there is no dignity in such an attitude
either.

In a shame culture people value their honor and their
dignity. They do not blame others for their problems. They take responsibility
and work to overcome whatever obstacles lie in their path. When they are wrong
they never shift the blame. In a culture is based on apology people never blame
others for their failings.

In a guilt culture, honor and dignity take a back seat to
the need to divide the world between criminals and victims. Once this is done
the guilt culture will assert that justice-- the punishment of all criminals
and the redistribution of their ill-gotten gains to their victims—is the only
way to restore the social order that they have been working so hard to
undermine.

It’s unfortunate that the modern thinkers who are defining
the culture shift do not understand the basic differences between shame and
guilt cultures.

9 comments:

It does sound like people are using (or misusing) language to mean categorically different things. So is it accidental or intentional confusion or both? I'll accept I get more confused than not, so probably I've absorbed words used in contradictory ways, and not clarified for myself what way is correct.

I'll accept Stuart's definitions sees only one correct one (in cultural anthropology), so for me the problem becomes one of translation. What are people saying, and what do they mean, when their language usage is translated to the "correct" one?

Honor is an even more potentially confused word than guilt or shame in meaning. If people want to label something an "honor killing", I don't think you can simply say they are using the word wrongly, but try to deduce what they mean and see what words you'd say better represent the act. Of course, simple murder works fine.

And maybe that shows some of the deviousness of language. Words are distorted in such a way to avoid moral judgement against the murder. Like I'd rather be a freedom fighter than a terrorist, even if both words might be applied to my behavior.

Perhaps a useful way to consider is people who feel low status (for whatever reason) will use tactics, like labelling ordinary innocent behavior as a microaggression, because it gets them attention. A few years ago the word "female hypoagency", trying to show how men gain status by action, and women gain status by getting others to act in their behalf. Like this page:https://omegavirginrevolt.wordpress.com/2014/08/17/the-hypoagency-scam-women-use-to-manipulate-men/

So hypoagency would seem to exactly match "the virtue of victimhood", but victimhood is only part of it. Anyway, so if we can consider this victimhood stance is primarily a feminine one, that makes it easier to see why people fall for it.

To go back to the start that means we should also look at the masculine/feminine roles in TRUE "Shame cultures", and see how shame and honor are represented differently across genders. ... Yes I know its all in the book I haven't read.

What can google find?http://honorshame.com/understanding-8-traits-of-honorshame-cultures/-------Gender roles (sexism, gender discrimination) –A primary source of honor is observing the groups expectations of you. You are valuable to the community when you fulfill your role, and gender defines social expectations placed upon us. Men are to advance the family honor via victory in the public sphere; women are to avoid shame by means of modesty in the private realm.--------

So that's interesting in a shame culture men avoid dishonor, and women avoid shame?

In any case, it seems clear that honor has a context of in-group virtue, so the people that matter are the ones in your group, no matter what outsiders say about you, or perhaps status comes in here?

But back to us, it is a mess in a diverse culture where there are no clear boundaries of ingroup/outgroup members. And once there's no ingroup can't moderate individual behavior, we're left with "the state" to do the dirty work, and then passive "victimhood" is a useful tactic that gain power by exaggerating their vulnerability.

Baruch Spinoza defines emotion as a feeling of pleasure or pain accompanied by an idea about its cause. Beneath the words "shame" "guilt" "dignity" and "honor" are the patterns of emotions which perpetuate in cultures and persist in personal memory.

I had many peer discussions with a friend who later took a degree in psychology and asked me to participate in a paid talk therapy group. I found myself defending against a number of personal attacks, reluctant to pay for this pattern of behavior, and confronted by my former friend saying, "What do you want to do about the money you owe me?" In this case the expressed idea that I owe him money for a conversation in which I am defending against his hostility which he denies has its origin in his emotions which have their origin in his early childhood. Therapy, in my experience, does much more to serve the social and emotional needs of the therapist than of the patient of suffering person, despite the fact that therapists think they are conscious of how self and others play victim, rescuer, perpetrator games.

Baruch Spinoza is a dead white guy. Who cares what he thinks? And it doesn't sound like you have any emotions. You sound inhuman, and you seem to be writing here for your own stupid therapeutic catharsis. I don't care. Youre a victim to your own moronic worldview. You're a perpetrator of boring, pretentious prose. Rescue us by going away. Far, far away. -$$$

Mr. Olympia: You are the troll. I haven't been around here very long, but as I see it, you comment on this blog in disingenuous ways. You're not contributing to a conversation here. You're a hemorrhoid. You write volumes and drop all these stupid wiki links everywhere, and you say nothing and accomplish nothing. That's what a troll is, dumb ass. -$$$